Despite War's End, Violence Continues in Côte d'Ivoire

When French forces, alongside troops loyal to Côte d'Ivoire presidential
election winner Alassane Ouattara, finally ousted Ivorian election
loser Laurant Gbagbo from the office he'd attempted to hold through
all-out civil war, it looked like a stunningly successful
intervention. A tyrant had been removed, justice had been restored, war
had been prevented. But earlier this week, two months after Gbagbo's
removal and the ostensible end of Côte d'Ivoire's war, Human Rights
Watch released a report documenting a still-ongoing trend of deadly, sectarian violence in the country.

Though
the nature of this latest Ivorian crisis was political, the violence is
part of a much longer trend of political and religious divisions in the
country. Ouattara is Muslim, Gbagbo Christian. Those divisions became
the source of a lengthy civil war that began in 2002 and ended in 2007
with United Nations peacekeepers forcibly separating the two populations
and the militias they'd fielded. But the militias -- and the sectarian
tensions fueling them -- clearly still remain, and may for some time.
The intervention may have solved the political crisis, but the larger issues underlying that crisis remain in place.

Ouattara's
Republican Forces of Côte d'Ivoire (Forces Républicaines de la Côte
d'Ivoire, FRCI) killed at least 95 unarmed people in Abidjan during
operations in late April and May, when they sealed off and searched
areas formerly controlled by pro-Gbagbo militia

Most killings
were point-blank executions of youth from ethnic groups generally
aligned with Gbagbo, in what appeared to be collective punishment for
these groups' participation in Gbagbo's militias.

...[M]id- and high-level commanders had been at or near the place where some killings took place.

Nearly
every former detainee [of the Republican Forces] described being
struck repeatedly with guns, belts, rope, and fists to extract
information on where weapons were hidden or to punish them for alleged
participation in the Young Patriots, a pro-Gbagbo militia group.

The Republican Forces also killed older men accused of housing or assisting the militia.